RUINAS 4 valses by Cruz Mena Guitar solo PDF

How does Nicaragua sound? In 2022, Walter Abt was invited to work as an artist-in-residence in
Nicaragua by the Goethe-Institut. This was about insights into the scores of the composer José de la Cruz Mena
and the outstanding musician and composer Justo Santos.

José de la Cruz Mena (3 May 1874 – 22 September 1907) was a Nicaraguan composer.
When he was twenty-one years old he contracted leprosy, but continued to compose until his
death twelve years later. Cruz Mena is considered to have been one of the most prominent
Nicaraguan composers of his time and one of the most important composers from that
country. He attended the Escuela Nacional de Música in Managua as a child, and played
trumpet in bands in the city, composing several famous waltzes. He fell ill with leprosy,

but was not sent to the nation's leper colony after writing three
items of music that he dedicated to José Santos Zelaya, the President of Nicaragua. He was
completely blind after five years, by 1896, and rarely appeared in public due to his disease.
Regardless, his entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians described Cruz Mena
as "the pre-eminent Nicaraguan composer of his time". He died twelve years after contracting
leprosy, near the Chiquito River in León, on 22 September 1907.
He is sometimes known as "the divine leper" and a theatre in León is named in his memory.
Much of the music Cruz Mena composed was religious in nature, and while he composed
numerous works, much of it is lost. In 2008 Mena was described in Culture and Customs of
Nicaragua as one of the "four most important academic composers in the history of music in
Nicaragua", in addition to Alejandro Vega Matus, Carlos Alberto Ramirez, and Luis Abraham
Delgadillo.